The exhibition is divided into five chronological fields: Cuba and the search for a national expression (1868-1927); New art, avant-garde and recreation of an identity (1927-1938); A Cuban style: affirmation and distribution (1938-1959); With the Revolution everything, against the Revolution nothing (1959-1979); The Revolution and I: The individual and history (1980-2007).

There are more than 400 manifestations of Cuban visual arts exhibited for the first time outside of Cuba. This exhibition is made up of paintings, drawings, illustrations, hundreds of documents, photographs and posters from before and after the Revolution, as well as installations, videos, movies and music.

The exhibition was made with the cooperation of private collectors, of U.S. and European museums and of course with the important Cuban collection from the National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba and with the valuable collaboration of the French-Canadian Nathalie Bondil, director of the Fine Arts Museum from Montreal together with the coordination, orientations and contributions of Moraima Clavijo Colom, director of the Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba. They were complemented with the contribution of specialists, directives, conservators, art critics, paint conservators, curators, Cuban carpenters for special wooden crates and packs. In summary, this was a complicated project made true which was originated by the Cuban Tourism Office in Montreal.

The exhibition presents among hundreds of artistic pieces, twenty paintings that represent being Cuban, created by Wifredo Lam, the most universal of the Cuban painters and many original creations by master painters from Cuban avant-garde movement: Marcelo Pogolotti, Jorge Arche, Amelia Peláez and René Portocarrero among others. there may also be appreciated famous illustrations published in national magazines in successive decades and observe different posters with novel artistic and visual communication conceptions. Among these posters there are predecessors of Cuban revolutionary graphic art, that were designed and printed in artistic silk screen from the early morning of the day of the Revolutionary triumph (January 1, 1959) by Eladio Rivadulla, National Design Award and as well as other ones created during the wonderful 1960s for the Organización de Solidaridad de los Pueblos de Africa, Asia y América Latina (Organization of Solidarity of the People of Africa, Asia and Latin America) (OSPAAAL in Spanish) by famous the designers Jesús Forhans, René Mederos, Guillermo Menéndez and Faustino Pérez. Among other important posters there are also important visual advertisings created for the Casa de las Américas and the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (Cuban Institute for the Arts and Cinematographic Studies) (ICAIC in Spanish) by the award winner designers Alfredo Rostgaard and Eduardo Muñoz Bachs. There are also famous artistic creations in different genres, such as the mythic photo of Che Guevara taken by Korda and the diversity of plastic conceptions recently generated by new artistic generations, exemplified by Los Carpinteros and Kcho, among other Cuban creators that are known all over the world.

Something else of this exhibition that deserves to be highlighted because of its considerable cultural and historical value is the edition of the wonderful book-catalogue of the exhibition with its master aesthetic conception done by the Publication Department from the National Fine Arts Museum. This is a book of 424 pages that contains the chronological history of Cuban plastic arts from 1868 to 2007 separated into five stages as the exhibition collection. This book is also documented with 450 images printed with chromatic and polygraph fidelity, placed through a wonderful art design of the book. It is a nicely achieved selection, with a proper distribution and proportion of the images from its cover, in which it is reproduced a very nice piece of Marcelo Pogolotti and completed on the inside with other pieces by him and other 450 images of famous paintings, produced in successive historical stages of expressive search. Among them there are pieces from founding plastic artists such as: Federico Miahle, Miguel Melero, Esteban Chartrand, Valentín Sanz Carta. There are also later authors such as: Armando G. Menocal, Leopoldo Romañach, Enrique García Cabrera, Domingo Ramos, as well as paintings of new art Cuban style, of the first few years of the Revolution and of selected contemporary painters. They are all placed and printed with chromatic fidelity and an excellent polygraph termination with twenty essays and bibliographical notes that cover 140 years of Cuban art. This has been done in separate editions in French and English and is soon to come in Spanish.

(Cubarte)